James: Kory, we get together, we have a little chat, often things about funnels and traffic. In fact, someone asked us the other day on one of our videos, what is a funnel? I want to ask you that question as well before we dive into our main topic today which is how we can grow our business much faster. So let’s start with what is a funnel?

Kory: I love that question. Your answer was good. You said it was the sales path. And what I think about that, is the conversation we have with a prospect to bring them into our world. In the old days, a funnel would have been, on your car lot days, a walk on and a conversation that was your funnel, right? And maybe you’re doing outreach.

James: So maybe they’re newspaper ads or the big company would spend money getting bus shelters or advertising on the side of the bus in the local area, causing people to be aware of you and eventually they come into the dealership. They can get complicated and expensive if you’re not careful.

Kory: Yep. And it’s just good to never lose sight of what is this job? You don’t need more steps than you need, right? So just because a fancy sophisticated funnel’s working for someone else’s business doesn’t mean that that’s right for your business. It’s about custom fit.

James: Would you say that there’s been a whole industry built around making funnels more complicated than they need to be?

Kory: Yes, I’d say that’s true. I think there’s a lot of new people coming into the world of I want to start a business, right? Entrepreneurism is now very accepted. It’s part of our culture, being an entrepreneur, being a founder, and there’s a lot of people supporting that which means there’s a lot of people who don’t really understand how marketing works. And there’s always someone there ready to sell them something, right?

And it’s just a matter about buyer beware and understanding who really understands and who’s just read a good book, and now they’re pitching you on their interpretation of that book. So I’m not the only one who looks at these huge Gantt charts and flows and just think, Okay, this is too much. I need to get help with that. Like a lot of funnels out there in the more established deep-pocket businesses might look like that. But certainly, businesses like mine is not even anywhere close to that. It’s like podcast to website, opt-in for the content upgrade, and then check to see if they’re a member, send a request to see if they’d like to find out more. And then if they visit the sales page, then I might check in with them to see if they’re interested in buying for whatever reason they didn’t at end of sequence of emails. That’s a typical sales pathway for the way someone would join SuperFastBusiness membership. And it’s not that complicated.

There are a few behavioral-based elements and there are real basics in there, some foundational stuff. Like, Hey, if you’re listening to this, go to the website, we have extra things you can go and get. And that is a short, simple pathway to turn someone who’s listening into someone who’s now an email subscriber.

Kory: Yeah, it’s how do we grow and how do we speed up the growth? Couple things that I spent a lot of time thinking about. And fundamentally, it’s about understanding what’s stopping your growth. If you’re not really clear what’s stopping you from getting your results, you’re going to end up investing in a lot of activities that maybe aren’t even going to help, right?

So step one, what’s the roadblock? And so the next thing is understanding the fundamentals. There are only three ways to grow. And you and I both having a rich history with Jay Abraham, in helping us shape our thoughts, he helped point that out. There are only three things you can do, you can get more customers, you can sell more to them, and you can increase how often they buy. And I’ve always found it helpful to just return to those fundamentals and figure out which of those three things are we working on now? So if you’re running Facebook ads, right?

Okay, so you’re at the part where you’re getting more customers. And if you do that really well, if that’s the thing your business really needs is more customers then that’s great. You double down, but maybe what you want is more profit from the customers you have. I think it was Brian Tracy once said, it was a course on speed reading. And he said, the best way to speed read is to not read the book at all. Eliminate from your reading library the stuff that’s not relevant to you. And it’s like that with marketing. It’s just don’t start the marketing projects that aren’t actually going to fix your business. That’s one way to speed up growth is don’t spin your wheels doing a bunch of things that aren’t actually going to fix the problem.

James: That’s such a critical thing. It’s one of my favorite tricks, actually, is to just delete stuff out of the mix. The first thing I want to do when I’m helping a business is go and look at their analytics, their cart data, like which products actually sell, where’s the profit?

And who’s buying them and how did they acquire those customers because it’s a good indicator that that pathway could be strengthened. You could turn on more customers for that one because they’re already spending money and they’re already spending it more frequently. They’re the hyper customers. And then, of course, there’s going to be marketing efforts that are a complete waste. And unless you’re tracking that and you should always track marketing if you possibly can, then you won’t know which is the thing.

But in this day and age, it is much easier to track your marketing efforts, to see what you’re putting in here and where it comes out there. And, of course, you have to allow for things like delay, because it’s going to take some time for things to pan out all the way through. It’s probably well beyond the scope of your average expert or business owner who’s not an expert in traffic and data analytics, they’re going to get overwhelmed pretty quickly in trying to marry up all the data, right?

Kory: Yep, it can be overwhelming.

James: I think you’re going to say the same thing. That’s why if you’re going to know where you’re getting held up, you need to know your data.

Kory: That’s right. Many people are familiar with the idea of the lead startup or, you know, lean manufacturing, and they’re creating minimum viable products. And I look at it, what’s your minimum viable funnel? That’s where you want to start. What’s the least amount of effort you have to put in to turn a visitor into a customer and get that working, and then you can always make it better. I mean, and we all know this, simplify and focus, right? But it’s harder to do than just to know. So that’s why we need coaches, that’s why we need help.

James: For a lot of people that minimum viable funnel is one email, just one email to the people who are already buying from them. And ask them if they’re still interested in buying more or the prospects who haven’t bought, if they’re still interested. It’s a Dean Jackson technique, nine-word email. It’s very powerful. And it’s probably the simplest way. So it is critical to, at some point in your business, to build up the ability to reach out to customers whether that’s having a strong social channel or having an email database or message base or collecting phone numbers. If you can reach the customer, it gives you a lot more power to have rapid growth than if you’re trying to start from zero, right?

Kory: Yeah, hundred percent.

James: But even if you’re starting from zero, you’d have to think some other person has acquired a database of your customers. And you could just sidle up to them and make them a really appealing offer to reach out to their customers with your offer. And you can tap straight into that. So that’s another rapid growth strategy is to plug into someone else’s customer base.

Kory: Absolutely. I got a new client and he sells this invention for organizing cables, you know, at the back of your computer. And it sounds really simple, but he goes into hospitals and he makes their workstations look great. Well, he’s partnered with a company that sells the arms that the monitors are mounted on. And by partnering, that company has got him but $130,000-worth of business in the last three or four months, because his service makes that arm work better, they get more sales. So that alliance has cost him zero marketing dollars. He’s got more business that he can handle and it’s a really overlooked opportunity in this day and age and who has your customers? That’s a great first question to start with.

James: Yeah, I think Jay Abraham talks about host beneficiary relationships. You know, I was speaking to a fitness expert last night. And I suggested he bundles a coupon to his product into a healthy food supplier. He could put a bright orange sticker on the back of the food packaging that goes out to every single customer on a subscription for healthy food. And they could all get this online fitness program. That’s taking advantage of a piggyback opportunity. That stuff’s going out anyway, you might as well piggyback it with your little coupon.

And you could even give an affiliate commission to that food company so they could stand to gain from that relationship as well. You know everyone’s a winner there. Three winners, you’ve got the fitness company, the food company, and of course, the customers who are now going to eat healthy and learn how to move properly.

Kory: It’s a great idea, you know, do you find that these ideas are kind of, they’re going away. This is old school. Not that old school, but really this concept of host beneficiary and looking at the fundamentals, it gets lost in today’s world of digital marketing and the latest trends in social media and that kind of stuff. But there are things that continue to work and it gives you an advantage if you can also incorporate those in your mix, even if you’re purely an online business, right? Having knowledge of this kind of marketing really helps out.

James: I think it’s definitely not well known. And I think it’s because people’s focus has been put on the latest tactic or a tool to automatically contact people and LinkedIn to get them to reply to your sales offer, those sorts of things. Everyone’s doing that. So if you could take some older, established techniques that are timeless, you can really have a huge advantage.

So hopefully, some tips we’ve talked about today will help someone watching this grow faster. And if you want some help from Kory, go to GrowFastMarketing.com and get the man himself on it. And he’ll help you in three ways. Kory is an expert at driving the traffic. He’s also going to help you set up the right funnel AKA pathway to the sale. And then he’ll also have good look at the data so that he can tune that machine and not just optimize it but also look for radical innovations based on what data is shown but also what the data is not showing, which is really half the secret to interpreting numbers. Again, I don’t think many people think much about.

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